Books, file folders, papers – these things have a tendency to breed prolifically in our office, rapidly taking over our two desks as we run out of places to stow them away. The messiness that I’m always complaining about in our office isn’t due so much to general slovenliness so much as utter lack of organization (or so we like to convince ourselves, at any rate). Clearly the only way to get some control over the chaos was to figure out how to make the room a bit more storage-friendly.

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. We do use our closet space – just not as a proper closet, of the stuff-it-full-with-things-you-don’t-use and hide-it-behind-closed-doors variety. Maybe it’s strange, but despite the fact that we’ve always had a storage predicament in this office, we’ve never used the closet like a normal closet. See, whereas most might assume that a closet is, by definition, a closed-off storage space, ours is actually a weird little semi-open area tacked on at the end of the room. That’s right: our closet has no doors.

When we first moved into the house, the closet area had these white plastic, matchstick-style, roll-up blinds to hide its contents. It looked terrible, worked poorly, and thus we tore them down almost immediately. And because the room has always felt just a tad too small to accommodate two office areas, we just decided to forgo the formal closet altogether. And so the blinds were never replaced and the closet area has remained open to view, a sort of extension of the room.